


Perchance

by Werelibrarian



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death In Dream, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Unhealthy fantasies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-08 10:31:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7754260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Werelibrarian/pseuds/Werelibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing shines up a halo faster than death. Or: Afterwards, Matt dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In the comics, when Matt makes a huge mess of his life, sometimes he just ditches it all and fucks off to the desert, or to L.A., or once into the sewers. I wondered how that might work with MCU Matt post season 2.

Matt puts his apartment into storage on a Saturday; it's cheaper than rent, and he doesn't need it anyway. The furniture, he sells to the landlord for ninety bucks. His kitchen things go to the neighbour downstairs for thirty. His suits get boxed. His books and belongings from the office, also boxed. Some things--the blanket with Elektra's blood on it, a pair of Foggy's leather gloves, a necklace left by Karen--he hurls in the corner and spends the day on the other side of the apartment. When he's falling down drunk and his clenched jaw is in searing, distracting pain, he drops those things into a box too.

He takes the Daredevil gear, some clothes, and whatever dry food he can carry.

He finds a storeroom above Melvin's shop. He duct-tapes over the broken windows and stuffs newspaper into the cracks in the walls. He cleans the floor as best as he can and makes his bed with his silk sheets safety-pinned around an army cot. He's stealing water and electricity and wifi--he'll probably have to sell his laptop for food, even though Melvin offers to let him eat out of his fridge whenever he needs. Melvin's also given him the use of his shower whenever Betsy's not home, but Matt goes up to the roof and scrubs his hair from an oil drum filled with frigid rainwater--the cold is the purest, sharpest peace he knows these days.

He sleeps all day, and spends his nights high above Hell's Kitchen.

The Hand have gone deathly quiet, and if he didn't know any better he'd have thought they'd been driven out of the city a second time. From rooftops, arrow swishes and katana slices are hard to pick up, but he listens, and there's nothing. Nothing. He raids their old bases--clean. He drops in on Madame Gao again and lets her heart tell him the truth. Still, he listens and he waits. He makes sure that the decapitated John Doe the police found in the alley makes it from the coroner's van to the morgue, and after weeks of going unidentified, from the morgue to the crematorium. Nobu doesn't get up again.

Maybe it would have been better if Matt had died from Nobu's blades the first time. If there hadn't been awkward months and so many fights and the fucking disaster of Frank's trial between Foggy finding out about him and the end of their friendship.

_Every time I walk up those stairs, I think today's the day you're dead on the living room floor._

The night of his first fight with Nobu, Matt had hit the floor barely conscious. But whatever part of his brain had kept telling his heart to pump and his lungs to fill--that's the part of Matt that recognizes Foggy. He'd heard him pounding on the door, drunk and cajoling. He'd felt his footsteps thundering down the roof-access stairs and the shake in his fingers when he flipped up the mask.

Through the murk and the blood pooling in his mouth, Matt had also sensed the awful way Foggy's heartbeat had seized up in a momentary stop, and as painful as it all was-- _Oh god, Matt?_ \--he would happily have accepted those traces of Foggy as the last things he experienced on earth. Maybe it would have been the kinder cut if Matt hadn't made Foggy live through months of dread and worry.

Would Foggy cradle his head, beg him not to leave? Would he scramble away until his back hit the wall and stare at Matt's black-clad corpse uncomprehendingly?

Matt _knows_ he's being selfish, because part of his brain tells him that if he died then, on that night, Foggy would never have found out about the few good things he'd done. Never known about the girl he saved. Never known what he was _trying_ to do. Matt would have died with Foggy thinking he was all the things the papers were calling him--the bomber, the criminal, the murderer.

There's no clarity, no lesson, and certainly no absolution in that sort of pain, and anyway Matt's not strong enough to endure that. Or inflict it.

So no. Not dead. Dying. Bleeding out, but still alive. Alive enough to tell Foggy all those things that have pushed up his throat for more than a decade. Matt hates that, even in his mind, he can't give Foggy the cleaner ending, that he needs to grandstand and have his fucking final say on his imaginary deathbed.

Below him, the city's noise is jagged and constant. Sirens. Crying. The smack of a fist against a mouth. Gunshots, from the direction of the docks. Matt takes off running.

After, Matt's whole body is a live wire. Everything thrums. He's doing what he is meant to be doing and for the moment at least, his body isn't an empty shell. He can hear his blood, and his breath whipping in and out of his lungs, and the pull of muscles and broken skin. If he focusses on the physical, he's here--he's whole. But Matt's fight-high never lasts, and it's not long before he feels like a zippo that won't light, no matter how many times its flicked.

He drops into his cot, not caring that he's smearing blood onto his sheets from split knuckles. Outside, it sounds like early morning--rattle of trash cans, street sweeping trucks, store-front security gates rolling up. His chest feels like an open grave but the heart wants what the heart wants. He knows it's disgusting, and probably a sin besides. But he's lain awake until noon in a torturous daytime insomnia as his mind cracked and warped with unwanted thoughts.

Matt doesn't deserve peace, but he does need a little sleep. The fact that his dreams wish suffering on Foggy is his selfish nature at work. The fact that they're his only comfort nowadays is his damnation. 

He closes his eyes, recalls the floor of his living room under his cheek, the blood pooling under his chest.

Foggy's hands turning him over. Foggy's fingers on his face. Foggy's breath, Foggy's runaway-stagecoach heart...

"Foggy..."

"Don't talk, Matt. I'm calling an ambulance. You're going to be ok. Oh god--"

A bloody smile. "Got a secret, Foggy."

"Oh, fuck you Matt--this is not the time!"

"Perfect time." Can't feel his feet anymore. Even the lines of fire on his torso are going cold. All he can feel is Foggy's heart beating. So loud. Beating for him, beating from within his own chest.

"Yeah, I got it. You're the man in black. And I'm gonna yell at you for that tomorrow, so fucking _hold on_ so we can keep that date, ok?"

"I saved a girl, did you know that?"

"You've saved a lot of people."

"Wanted. The city. Safer."

"Hey, you did, buddy. You saved Karen too, didn't you? Now _quit talking_ and hold still while I stop this fucking bleeding!"

"I have 'nother secret." Heart slowing. Tongue thick and mouth clogged with blood.

"No, Matt. Tell me tomorrow. Oh god, it's not working--"

"Foggy, stop." He gropes for Foggy's hands. They're wet. "S'ok. Need you to know."

"Let go of me, Matt! I have to stop the bleeding--you'll die if I don't!"

His arms feel leaden, but he reaches out to touch Foggy's face. "There you are."

Foggy's voice is thick with tears, and Matt doesn't even need his imagination for this part--he knows how it sounds. "Yeah, buddy. I'm right here."

"Always meant to tell you. How much I. Love you." Breathing is difficult, like he's fighting to stay above a wave. But that's what they say love is, isn't it? That it's not holding your breath, it's learning to breath underwater. "I did on the day I met you. And every day since."

He keeps his hand on Foggy's face--feels the broken smile there. "I love you too, Matt. So much." Matt grins, even through the encroaching cold, because he's happy. He'd take a thousand cuts to hear Foggy say that. It's not even a difficult choice.

"M'sorry I couldn't tell you. About this. Wanted to keep you safe."

"I know, love. It's ok--it'll all be ok."

Matt sleeps.


	2. Chapter 2

It's a Monday, and Matt's beginning to wonder how bad he looks. 

Last time he hassled Turk, the guy gave him the locations of two new gun-running crews and a sandwich. Melvin leaves him a thick oversized sweater that whiffs strongly of curry powder and fenugreek, and that's something Matt's never smelled that on Melvin himself. He wears it anyway because it's coming on winter. 

He kills the rats in his room by scaling quarters at them. There's a pile of their corpses at the far edge of the roof, and he wonders if he should burn them for heat. The smell might be worse than the cold.  

Matt knows he's killing himself in stages, but it doesn't feel that different from any other time of his life. He's a little colder and a little more lonely and in a little more pain, but it's not suicide. It's not. He's protecting the city. He's keeping people safe.

He sighs.

He's wasted so much energy trying to keep things. The apartment, the office. A sticky table at Josie's. A ceiling dripping with chilli lights. A set of concrete stairs at Columbia. Somewhere along the way he started putting all these things in his pocket and was surprised when he couldn't move for the weight.

Now he has none of it, and it's freeing, the lightness.

Sitting on a bare, hard cot with a rat-gut smelling coin dancing over his fingers, Matt is so tired. Even now he doesn't have the whole picture straight in his head. Everything's so fuzzy all the time. Crime in Hell's Kitchen is made of moving parts and the entire time Matt's been in the mask, he's been frantically ducking one part only to get clocked by another. He fights Nobu and Fisk comes at him from the side. He puts Frank away and The Hand come at him from--literally--below. 

He'll clean house till the city's safe, or until he drops. And if it's the latter, then the only reason anyone should be sad is because he's left the city in the hands of people like Frank, and Gao, and Stick. 

He flings the quarter with the speed of a slingshot. A squeak, a thump. Someone will get him eventually, just like that. 

Matt's not suicidal. He's not.

Matt won't die quietly, but he'll die in the quiet. After the cut and thrust of a fight, when it's really over, it's deafeningly silent. It's then that he'll feel the rain on his face, he'll hear his noisy breath slow, and he'll just...go.

Maybe he should start carrying a letter, like soldiers do. _Dear Foggy._

Matt presses his face to the pillow. What could he possibly write? Pages and pages of I'm sorry's. A phonebook's worth of I love you's.

_You were my one good thing._

It's not nearly enough. It's the tip of an iceberg, a pinprick of a star compared to its gargantuan size. Foggy's the one thing Matt never got to ruin. Their friendship, the years and years of good times, they'll always have existed, unerasable, untaintable. He let Foggy go, and now he's safe in his new office, and nothing Matt does from here on out can hurt him anymore.

And maybe after Matt's dead, in time Foggy will remember him with warmth in his heart. That's more than he deserves. That'll be enough.


	3. Chapter 3

Foggy starts work at Hogarth's firm. It's a Wednesday.

He doesn't actually get a corner office. From the rooftop of the next building, Matt listens to Foggy unpack in his normal, junior-associate sized office. He hangs up his diploma. He introduces himself to his new co-workers with a bright, professional voice. From this far away, Matt can't be sure, but when Foggy places a small object beneath the screen of his computer where only he can see it, Matt thinks--hopes, prays--it's a plastic dinosaur.

Karen--she gets an office at the Bulletin. She stops wearing heels and starts wearing jeans and boots. Over the course of six hours, she's in and out of the Bulletin's front door five times and her pavement-pounding walk is practically a run. When she talks on the phone, it's an unceasing waterfall of words and demands and provoking questions, but when she pokes her head out of her office door to speak to the journalists she vaulted over to get her job, she sounds as genuine and warm as she ever did speaking to him and Foggy. She's stunning.

Maybe Foggy would marry Karen someday. The thought makes Matt smile grimly. Foggy in his corner office, one of Manhattan's brightest legal minds, and his wife the investigative journalist, the firebrand, the bloodhound. The one who holds Hell's Kitchen accountable to itself.

Later, they'd have beautiful, silken-haired children. A boy and a girl. And they would both have Karen's swan-like neck and Foggy's button nose. They'd have Karen's tenacity and Foggy's boundless empathy. And their parents would talk about them with the incandescent pride that Jack once had for Matt, and they'd be the most loved children in the world.

Two fantasies overlay in Matt's head and he digs his fingers under the mask, pressing on his eye sockets like he can stub the dream out of his head. In one, he's rushing into the hospital, his shirt untucked and barely hiding the underarmour of the Daredevil gear. He skids into the room, glasses askew and cane flapping. Foggy's sitting there, next to Karen, holding a bundle that smells of milk and newness.

"Hey, come here, you." Foggy says, in a soft voice Matt's never heard before. He lays the bundle in Matt's arms. "This is Kieran Matthew Nelson."

Matt starts to cry--he knows that he would--and Foggy hooks him around the neck to touch their foreheads together. He's crying too, and Matt has Foggy's tears on his face and it feels like baptism. From the bed, Karen's sniffling and laughing at them, and he goes to sit with her and kisses her cheek, her and Foggy's baby nestled warm and flannelly in his arms.

The dream dissipates like smoke. In another reality, Kieran's a young boy with Foggy's curls, pointing at a photo. "Who's that, Daddy?"

Foggy picks him up. "That's your Uncle Matt, buddy."

"Who's Uncle Matt?"

"Uncle Matt was my best friend when mommy and I were younger" he says, his eyes catching Karen's from across their cozy apartment. His voice is smiling and sad at the same time. "He was someone that I...that I loved very much and he died. He was a hero, you know, and we named you after him so that he'd always be with us."

Foggy--real Foggy-- doesn't have too many photos of Matt, to the best of his memory, but they took one when they graduated, and again in front of the L&Z sign, and one with Karen in front of their newly painted office door. In his mind, Foggy's pointing to a photo of the two of them, arms around each other's shoulders, smiling like there's no injustice in the world. That photo doesn't exist, and neither does Kieran, but that's how he'd want Foggy's son to know him. He wants Foggy to tell stories about him, to Karen, to his children.

Matt sits at the edge of the roof clutching his head. The unmitigated gall, to presume that Foggy would give him pride of place on his mantelpiece. But even if Foggy hates him for the rest of his life, he knows Matt well enough to know there is no one else to remember him. Who else was going to do it? Frank? _Stick_? The last item on the list of ways Matt has wronged Foggy is to make him responsible for his memory, and because Foggy would always be Foggy, maybe he'd do Matt this one final favour.

He'd tell his children the fun, innocent stories. Matt's first--and only--encounter with ice skates. How Matt had held Foggy's hand when he needed stitches from a soft-ball injury. That time in their first apartment, when their rickety bookshelf had collapsed in the middle of the night, sending their law textbooks crashing to the ground like a bomb going off. Foggy had slapped the lights on to reveal Matt, half out of bed with his fists up. And when he couldn't stop vibrating from the adrenaline, Foggy made him hot chocolate--Irishing it strong enough to drop a cow--and played with his hair until he was ready to go back to sleep.

Later, after the children are put to bed, Foggy and Karen pour Macallan and curl up together. Karen, who is braver than the two of them combined and always saw through their bullshit, pulls Foggy's head on her shoulder and says "tell me the story of how you fell in love with him."

Foggy sips his scotch, and wipes his eyes, and tells her.

Matt's mind refuses to play that part for him, because, like the photograph where they're happy, it doesn't exist. It can't. There's not a day that Matt hasn't been lying to Foggy, and even in this addled, nightmarish state, he can't quite stomach comforting himself with a fairy tale of Foggy falling in love with something that's not even a man--just a shadow of a lie.

Sometimes, Matt is relieved that one part of him at least is still standing firm, saying no, keeping him from hurting Foggy with his poisonous desires. But he's losing the fight with himself, and when he is far gone enough, when he _is_ able and willing to dredge up those false words, stuff them in Foggy's mouth in order to soothe his own selfish heart, maybe he won't feel the terrible sin of it. It'll just be another story to tell himself as he goes to sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for conflict involving domestic violence.

The chair in the waiting room is supple leather and chrome. Matt crosses his legs and fiddles with his cane nervously; the sun slanting through the windows of the office of Hogarth Chao and Benowitz warms the side of his face.

_The concrete is freezing under his back. Matt kicks out and scrapes his heel through a puddle--blood or water, he's not sure. A wind sweeps down and chills the sweat on his face. He turns over and coughs, and tries to push up on his hands._

There's a meeting, just breaking up. Everyone shaking hands and filing out into the lobby. Dozens of pairs of shoes make a rain of footsteps. Down the corridor, a smaller meeting is also breaking up. Two women. One crying a little, her murmured words grateful. They come out into the lobby and skirt the larger crowd. The lawyer walks her client towards the receptionist.

There's an anxious heartbeat coming up in the elevator. Matt turns his head, but he keeps getting distracted by Foggy's laugh.

"I'm glad you're pleased with the outcome, Mr. Ballantyne. It's been--" Foggy catches sight of him. "Would you excuse me for just a second?"

Matt stands as he approaches. "What are you doing here?" Foggy hisses.

_Just like the kids' song, Matt thinks. Head and shoulders, knees and toes. He gets his knees under him, then a foot, then two feet, and dear god his top half is heavy. He stays on all fours for several long breaths, then sits back on his heels. The skin on his side is fever hot. He touches it and winces, smells his fingers. Blood._

It's been months, nearly a year. But Foggy's voice--devoid of the warmth that Matt used to use to tell him apart from other voices, missing all that used to be what was "Foggy" to Matt--is still startling.

"I have a meeting."

"With who?"

"That's none of your business," Matt says. This is who we are now, he thinks.

The client who was crying is saying goodbye, and thank you, thank you so much, it's like I can breath again. The lawyer touches her shoulder and says, "take care of yourself."

"You can't just come here out of the blue, Matt. I work here. I've made a life here, and I don't think for a second you actually have a meeting with anyone at HCB. You look like shit and --"

The anxious heartbeat in the elevator is closer now, in the lobby with him and Foggy and the client and twelve other lawyers.

The client gasps. "Keith!"

The lawyer pushes the client behind her and snaps, "you're violating a restraining order. Get out of here or I'm calling the police."

Keith growls, "she's my wife, and you can't take her away from me. I don't care what the judge said."

He pulls out a gun, and there's pandemonium.

_He's panting like a bellows and his head is completely scrambled. For a second, before the panic sets in, it's almost nice--everything's a beautiful velvety blur of null information, of white noise. But it means walking in a straight line is out of the question, much less finding the way home._

_He can still hear, and he's alone at the docks--or alone enough that being found isn't likely. Slowly, the frazzled static of his radar sense coalesces into something clear enough to steer by, and he gets to his feet._

Keith has shattered the landline at the reception desk, and made them all drop their cellphones on the ground. Everyone who works at Hogarth Chao and Benowitz was in that meeting, and there's no one outside, in the rest of the building, that knows what's going on.

The client's scared but her words are low and angry, and Matt cheers for her inside. But the gun spikes the smell of cordite and oil all over the place. It's fresh, it's primed, and Matt doesn't doubt that Keith knows how to use it.

The lawyer is full-body blocking the shot, but she's a small woman and easily moved aside. The fact that the husband hasn't tried to pull his wife away is bad news, in Matt's mind. It means that two bodies on the floor would be perfectly acceptable to him.

The other lawyers and clients are standing stock still. Hogarth, Ballantyne, he heard Marci works here too now. _They_ all have self-preservation instincts. Matt's sure the lawyer in front of the gun is good at her job, and probably a friend to most of these people. But they're not moving, not for her. They'll come down on Keith like a tonne of bricks once this is all over, but no one's going to try anything that gets the barrel of that gun pointed at them. Except.

"Hey. Keith, was it?"

Maybe Foggy hasn't spent enough time away from Matt.

The gun swings around, and three hands grab at Matt as he starts forward.

"Keith, you haven't shot anyone. Just the phone, and I'll bet that it was due for an upgrade, wasn't it?" Foggy jokes, looking towards the shaken receptionist. "You're not in any trouble yet, Keith. You aren't, I promise. But you will be if you don't put the gun down."

"She has to know," Keith grits out, pointing the gun back at the lawyer and the client, "she can't do this to me. She humiliated me. In court! In front of everyone. She told people I did things to her."

"You did!" screams the client, over the lawyer's shoulder. Keith screams back for her to shut her mouth.

Matt's heart sinks as Foggy starts walking forward. Slowly, footsteps nearly silent on the marble.

"I get that. A man's reputation is everything. But this, what you're doing here? How do you think that'll look? What are all these people going to say about you then? They're all lawyers, Keith. They'll go into court and swear on a stack of bibles that you're a good man, that you would never hurt anyone. You just have to put. The gun. Down."

"She can't get away with it. I won't let you get away with it, Lisa! Did you think I'd let you lie, and just walk away?"

Lisa says nothing, doesn't argue, her ability to hope for the best obliterated by years of terror. She's learned that "he wouldn't do that" is meaningless and it's a lie she doesn't tell herself anymore. The lawyer shushes her, starts backing her up.

Everyone smells like fear, sweat. Someone's urinated a little bit. But there's a sharpness that rises from Foggy, a wave of fresh perspiration that tells Matt he's going to do something really stupid.

"You know what, Keith? We all know you're an abusive bastard," he barks.

Keith wheels on Foggy, his gun trembling with fury. The lawyer pushes Lisa out of the lobby and disappears after her. Keith's too slow, and he's pointing the gun at a slammed-shut door.

Chase after them, Matt prays. Let us go, chase after them and I'll have you before you the elevator arrives.

Keith doesn't. He grabs Foggy by the collar and pushes the gun against his neck. Hands tighten on Matt's arms again.

"You let her get away!" Keith growls.

Foggy's petrified. Matt can smell it. But he keeps going. "What are you going to do? The police are coming now."

_He's confused, and rests his head against an apartment window. It's quiet and cool--no one's home. Halfway up the building, and he's forgotten what street he's on. Two blocks from the storehouse? Or twenty? Get up high, Matt. You're too close to all the smells and all the sounds, they pull at you like claws. Keep going, get to the roof._

_He fumbles for the ladder, his way up to the next set of fire escapes. His gloves feel like slabs of clay, and he can't get a grip to climb. His foot slips and he crashes against the metal grating, dizzy and bruised._

_Get up high, Matt. Can't stay here._

_Maybe just a short rest._

Matt swats the restraining hands away from him. "Let him go," he orders Keith.

The gun moves away from Foggy and towards him, and Matt's blood unfreezes. Matt puts his cane on the ground and walks towards them, hands out.

"Keith, look at me. I can't hurt you. But I need you to let him go. Don't make it worse." He touches the end of the gun with his fingers and jerks back like a scared civilian.

"Matt, get the fuck out of here," Foggy whispers, all bravado gone.

"Yeah, Matt," Keith sneers. The gun jams into Foggy's chest, and Foggy gives a sob.

Matt finds the gun again, and slowly, so slowly, slides his hand between the muzzle and Foggy's shirt. If it goes off, Matt will have a hole in his palm and Foggy'll be dead, but it gets the point across. "I can't. This is where I belong."

Between Foggy and the gun.

"Matt, I swear to god," Foggy says, voice full of intensity.

Matt smiles, feeling profound peace. "I hear sirens," he tells Keith.

Keith yowls in frustration and Matt feels all the muscles in his arm tighten. Matt kicks Foggy in the back of the knee and shoves him in the shoulder at the same time, sending him skidding safely across the floor, just as the gun goes off.

_Matt hunches on the roof, listening for voices. There's blood seeping into his pants from the wound on his side, and he was fighting vomiting that last climb up. Listen for Melvin. Follow his voice home._

_A sound catches in his brain and he whirls, stumbles. Falls down._

_Foggy._

_"No, Marci, come on, I'm looking at the books the shipping company handed over, and they're so cooked they made my oven timer go ding."_

_A pause. He's on the telephone. Matt presses his face to the tar-smelling surface of the roof and breathes._

_"Well, I'm going to go over there and ask for the real ones. That's what I'm gonna--Marci. Marce. I am not acting like--don't bring him into it. please. Uh-huh. No, I'm pouring wine."_

_This is fine, Matt thinks. I could just stay here. Foggy's voice in his ear, far away but real. Real and so close and so true. More perfect than Matt could ever have made up in his mind. He's right there and Matt loves him so much._

Matt stays standing for a few seconds, and for that he's proud. He can feel the bullet nestled somewhere in his small intestines. The pain is world-shaking.

"Oh, wow," he croaks, and crashes to his knees. His glasses go skittering. 

"Matt!" Foggy shouts, and catches him. Distantly, he hears Keith fighting against the handcuffs and police officers calling for an ambulance.

"Hey, you’re talking to me again," Matt says. Foggy's hands cover his, all tangled up in the mess that is his stomach.

"You fucking idiot," Foggy says, and he's crying, "This is _my_ life, Matt. It's not your job to--"

"Don't cry, Foggy. I'm fine." Someone cuts open his shirt and presses a bandage to the bullet hole. Matt screams. Foggy gurgles like he's going to be sick.

"Why’d you have to--"

"You know I can't resist the spotlight," Matt jokes. The paramedics are making frustrated sounds over him, but the pain's stopping, replaced by a sort of cool nothingness. He's going numb from the centre of his body outwards. "Foggy?"

"Yeah, I’m here."

"Foggy, I know you're angry with me, and that's alright. But," he better do this quick, because he can feel blood coming up his throat, "will you kiss me?"

"Why, Mr. Murdock," Foggy tries for arch and misses it by the breadth of a galaxy. "You piece of shit, Matt."

"See, I know I'm going to be fine, because you keep calling me names," Matt says.

"You’re awful," Foggy chokes.

“One time offer," Matt says, and Foggy loses it completely. Matt tries to pat his shoulder. "Foggy, please."

Kissing Foggy is like slipping into a warm bed, like slipping into an untroubled sleep, and Matt could weep at how right it feels. Foggy holds him tight and kisses him like he could push life into him as quickly as it's draining out, and he's so near. Matt breathes him in.

"I love you, Matt," Foggy whispers.

Matt smiles an amazed smile, because that's a gift he never thought he'd get. In all his dreams, he never once imagined Foggy would be the one to say it first.

_Well, that's a lie, Matt, but what isn't?_

"That’s so nice. Say it again?" Matt uses up the last of his breath.

He feels Foggy kiss his mouth, and repeats a litany of love, words running together and smeared with tears, gradually fading, and then nearly--

_Matt collapses outside Melvin’s workshop. He has no idea what time of night it is, so if there's no one inside to help him now, he may just end up a nasty surprise for someone in the morning._

_"Oh shit, get him inside," someone calls. Matt feels hands lift him by the armpits and drag him out of the street._

_"Melvin?" he slurs._

_"We got you, man."_

_"Thanks."_

_“Don’t worry about it.”_

_He's heaved onto something soft. Probably not his cot. He wants to go back into the dream but Melvin won't stop talking._

_"Betsy’s getting bandages. We think you're going to be fine, just lost a lot of blood. Are you ok? You were mumbling.”_

_"I'm fine." It's nothing._

**Author's Note:**

> Occasionally I'm interesting on [Tumblr](http://www.werelibrarian.tumblr.com)


End file.
